Antique restorer Han Ming dies suddenly after staying up all night binge-watching Under the Zhengyang Gate. When he opens his eyes, he has become Han Chunming, the character who was just fired from the food factory. The winter wind cuts through the capital in 1978, and the sudden vibration in his arms from the Huaxia Appraisal System makes him realize this isn't a dream. At last, he has the chance to rewrite all the frustrating regrets he accumulated while watching the show. With antique appraisals in one hand and business in the other, he writes a perfect essay predicting Pudong's development while Cheng Jianjun is still forging exam prep booklets. When Hou the Junk Dealer is guarding a chipped bowl as a family heirloom, Han Chunming has already traded three jin of grain coupons for an imperial memorial bearing the Kangxi Emperor's vermilion annotations in the countryside of Hebei. While Su Meng agonizes over whether to accept her uncle's offer to fund her studies abroad, the secondhand market he founded in the capital is taking in over ten thousand in a single day, and a Hong Kong businessman pounds on his door in the middle of the night, begging for help with a Chenghua chicken-cup bowl shattered into eight pieces.
With the System backing him, every step of his life is a winning move:
His guitar performance of Love Song 1980 at Beihai Park gets Su Meng to kiss him first. Carrying Cai Xiaoli through a rainstorm to the military hospital prompts a senior officer to grant them special permission to marry. At an auction in Hong Kong, he restores the Twelve Zodiac animal heads with his bare hands, astonishing collectors overseas. In a barter deal in Moscow, he even trades Erguotou liquor for fighter jet blueprints. Cheng Jianjun upgrades his counterfeiting three times, moving from silver dollars to Yuan dynasty blue-and-white porcelain and then digital collectibles, but Han Chunming crushes every scheme with a glaze-bubble distribution chart and a quantum artifact scanner. In the end, Cheng Jianjun is handcuffed on a live episode of CCTV's Appraisal, screaming, “You son of a bitch, you're not Han Chunming at all!”
But no one knows how many secrets he guards through the late nights:
Just before the Nine Gates Commandant dies, he tremulously grips Han Chunming's hand
